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Arrivals: Five books on being human

Here are five recent and upcoming releases that examine aspects of being human: death, revenge, scandal, shame, youthfulness.

Fri., Jan. 16, 2015

Here are five recent and upcoming releases that examine aspects of being human: death, revenge, scandal, shame, youthfulness.

Juvenescence: A Cultural History of Our Age, Robert Pogue Harrison

Harrison, a culture commentator at Stanford University, says there has been a “wholesale biocultural transformation” that has left First Worlders forever young — in behaviour, appearance and expectations. This is both good and bad: juvenescence makes us energetic and innovative but also makes us easily distracted and greedy for gratification. A dense and often challenging book, provocative and original, that repays the effort it demands. But will a juvenescent society expend that effort?

Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, Atul Gawande

If you are familiar with Gawande’s articles in The New Yorker, you are aware of this physician-writer’s eloquence and compassion. In his fourth book, he takes on the medicalizing of death, examining the unnecessary torture that life-extending interventions often impose. But this book offers more than just prescriptions: his intimate knowledge of our bodies and the fascinating stories he’s picked up over his career makes this book required reading for anyone involved in end-of-life issues. And that inevitably includes each and every one of us.

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Is Shame Necessary?: New Uses for an Old Tool, Jennifer Jacquet

This New York University academic specializes in the environment, specifically “the intersection of conservation and co-operation.” Her interesting idea in Is Shame Necessary? involves the use of public shaming as an agent for structural social transformation. This goes far beyond collective action by consumers (eating only sustainable seafood, for example). Pointing the finger at bad practices in corporations and governments can be used to make them renounce bad practices and change their ways.

Glass Jaw: A Manifesto for Defending Fragile Reputations in an Age of Instant Scandal, Eric Dezenhall

Dezenhall, founder of the Washington crisis-management firm Dezenhall Resources, has been called, and not in a complimentary way, the “pit bull of public relations.” In this rousing “manifesto,” he explains that his fellow spin doctors have sold individuals and corporations a bill of goods: scandal today, he says, is a viral scourge that is unlikely to respond to mere communication strategies (saying sorry, getting ahead of the story, regarding a crisis as a learning moment, etc.). He then sets out to propose a few surprising countermeasures for our cynical times.

Payback, The Case for Revenge, Thane Rosenbaum

Revenge has gotten a bad rap, argues this legal journalist/novelist, and is indeed indistinguishable from what we call justice. Payback, he says, is a healthy response to bad behaviour (whether Osama bin Laden’s death-squad execution or much milder retributive efforts). Rosenbaum is a bracing polemicist and this “cultural tour of revenge and its rewards” serves to explain why getting even might put a smile on your face.

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